


it's quiet, after

by clarifioris



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, a twinfic but - twins standing separate, also the rest of vm handling things about as well as they can (which is Not Well), anyway how's that final arc feelin; are we all having fun, ep102 spoilers, one in life and one in death; but both still striving for their other half
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 08:29:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11353698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarifioris/pseuds/clarifioris
Summary: The hall is familiar now, when Vax steps into it, and he’s unsure if the fact reassures him or not.(It should disconcert him – it should terrify him, the way it did when he came here first via Vasselheim, dripping something else’s blood and offering the whole of him to a house not yet his.)(They say you get used to anything, with time – especially if you want to.)[ contains spoilers for episode 102 of critical role. ]





	it's quiet, after

The hall is familiar now, when Vax steps into it, and he’s unsure if the fact reassures him or not.

(It should disconcert him – it should terrify him, the way it did when he came here first via Vasselheim, dripping something else’s blood and offering the whole of him to a house not yet his.)

(They say you get used to anything, with time – especially if you want to.)

When he walks toward the stairs it’s like wading through sludge, so heavy and cold are his legs. It reminds him of how he came to be here, this time -- not through prayer, no, nor through pilgrimage. If he concentrates, thinking hard through the haze of waking up newly dead, he can still remember the feeling of the spell as it unspooled him into nothing.

He doesn’t have to focus to remember how Vex – to remember – to –

Vecna’s laughter threads through him, low and sibilant, and he grits his teeth against it before setting a hand on the banister. The stairs spiral endlessly up and he wishes, in a rare moment of want, for wings.

When he reaches the top, there’s an alcove, a little room framed by heavy, dark curtains. The inside is a balcony, overlooking an empty room that lies beyond – he finds her standing there, waiting for him. The slope of her shoulders is almost melancholic; but her face is impassive as she looks out over the room below, and when she turns to face him her expression does not change.

Usually he’d offer some sort of prayer, or wait for her to greet him. This time he steps forward into the alcove, feeling the brush of golden threads as he crosses the threshold, and fixes his eyes on the blank slate of her face.

“Where’s Vex?”

\- - - - - - -

They go stumbling out of the darkness and into long, vibrant grass, in the sudden quiet of the Feywild. Scanlan drops face first, exhausted, and without a word Vex reaches down to roll him over, pulling a waterskin from her side. Trinket makes a low, miserable sound and shuffles closer, nosing at his master and Scanlan alike until the latter stirs.

“This, I did not miss,” he says, feebly, and Vex gives him a watery smile before helping him up.

“Pike,” Percy snaps, sharp in his distress, and everyone looks over to see him bracing Keyleth as she reels. She drops his hand like it’s a hot iron in the next second, then plants her palms on the damp earth and heaves, retching as one long shudder arcs its way up through her spine.

Someone shouts something, muffled through the tide of her heartbeat in her ears. She digs furrows into the soil with her fingers, feeling some small part of her shriek with familiar terror at the thought of harming fey land; but she digs anyway, feels the loam coat her skin and tries to slow her breaths but she can’t – she can’t – she couldn’t –

“She’s hyperventilating,” Percy says, before Pike nudges him out of the way and he falls unhappily quiet. The cleric’s armor is still steaming, as she limps closer, and she has an eye on Grog until the moment she’s crouching in front of Keyleth instead.

(Grog is not looking at anyone, or anything for that matter. He’s looking up, out into the dusky expanse of the sky, and thinking hard about how seven without one is just – six, sitting and waiting for the one to return.)

“Keyleth,” Pike says, very gently. She waits until the druid twitches, before slowly taking her face into her hands. “Keyleth, you’re alright. We’re alright. Can you tell me what my name is?”

“I’m sorry,” Keyleth whispers back, instead. “I couldn’t – the plane shift – we were there already, I had to – we had to come here, but–,” Her voice cracks and she stops, biting down on her lip until blood beads.

Pike pulls her down, guides her until she can wrap her stiff, aching arms around her and hold her tight. “Shh, Keyleth. You did the best you could.” Pressed between them, her symbol lights faintly up, and she feels Keyleth stiffen, then calm as the restoration spell washes through her. “We all did. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I did,” she says, so quietly that Pike almost doesn’t hear. Her hands, streaked with dirt and soot, grip Pike a little tighter at the waist, and she presses her face into Pike’s neck. “I did.”

Across the clearing, Vex climbs to her feet. Seeing her look around, Percy opens his mouth – and hesitates, seeing the bundle of leather and cloth that she’s pulled from Scanlan’s grasp. Her knuckles are white, where she’s gripped one of the dagger hilts sticking out of the folded cloak.

“Where’s Vax?”

\- - - - - - -

“Alive,” Vax repeats, as close to reverent as he’ll ever get.

The Raven Queen nods. “Her thread is unbroken.”

She looks back out over the balcony’s edge, while he sags against the alcove wall and presses his sob back with the heel of one hand. Only when he’s recovered himself does she turn, the long tail of her robes sliding along the floor.

“And what of you, Vax’ildan?” She cocks her head slightly, birdlike, and waits while he dries his face. “What of your fate?”

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly, after a moment. She doesn’t move, but he senses the faintest raising of an eyebrow and elaborates. “I don’t, really. If they – if they’re still alive, all of them, then they’ll…”

It’s an unspoken question, and when she steps forward and brushes by him he follows her like a starved plant seeking the light. She leads him down the hall and into a darkened room, lit only by the faint glow of a pool of water that sits in the center of the tile floor. The shape of it resembles the altar at Vasselheim, and though its waters are clear it seems just as deep.

“No others have passed into my domain yet,” the Queen says quietly, plucking the hem of her robes up with a pale hand. She puts one bare leg into the water, then another, standing in the shallow edge of the pool as the water begins to brighten. “I sense them in your native plane, though they still carry the essence of the Shadowfell with them.”

He steps in after her, not minding the cold, and the water flattens into a pane that shows him a rapid series of images. The sounds flicker through his head too, muffled as if coming up through the water itself – there’s Grog’s familiar bellow, as he lunges across the tower’s top for Delilah; a bright spray of lightning, as Percy ducks into and out of the image, and Pike, wreathed in flames too bright to look at until they flicker abruptly out.

He fixes his eyes on Vex, who has one hand fisted in Trinket’s fur and the other reaching for Percy’s arm. Keyleth shouts once, her voice a crackling glimmer of desperation, and in a blink they’re all gone, a faint spark of magic all that’s left behind.

The water goes clear after, lapping quietly at his ankles once released from the scrying. He keeps looking down at it, until the Raven Queen lays a hand gently on his shoulder.

“Where they go from here, we know not,” she reminds him, her voice as cold and delicate as the porcelain of her mask. “And wistfulness is a slow poison, which makes ghouls of unhappy ghosts.”

He gives a tiny nod, before taking the hand she offers and stepping back out of the pool. They walk down the hall together, and down the stairs into the main hall; and here she takes him by both shoulders, her taloned grip firm but not unkind, and she looks down at him in pensive silence.

He holds her gaze, waiting not with bated breath, but with thoughts of Vex.

(His life for hers.)

(Always, always, his life for hers.)

“I am proud of you,” she decides, and she releases him before stepping back. “My champion, bold and grave.” The room darkens, as she gives him a very faint smile, and he watches in silence as her form flickers and becomes something feathered and vast. “Your thread has been a busy one, and you have woven your fate into something to call your own.”

Vax looks down at the single line of gold that leads from his chest up, in tangles and loops and braids, into her feathered crown.

He sees its twin, spooling free and unbroken out into the darkness, but always lingering so close to his. It leads up, out of the web and into the endless dark, where the sounds of the living realms drift faintly into the Queen’s domain.

“Will you let me stay?” he asks, tipping his head back even further so he can look into her dark eyes. He waits a beat, listening to the sluggish turn of his own heart in his cold chest, before he opens his mouth again. “I’d like to stay. To listen.”

The Raven Queen clicks her beak and considers, the gold draping her form glimmering as she thinks. After a pensive silence she relents, flickering down into the shape of a human again so she can lay a hand on his cheek.

“Not too long,” she says, kindly, “but yes.”

\- - - - - - -

“Gone,” she repeats, watching a muscle clench in Percy’s jaw as he looks away. Keyleth makes a broken sound from where she’s sitting and Pike soothes her again, murmuring too quietly for Vex to hear.

“He disintegrated,” Scanlan says softly, from where he’s standing next to her. “There's... nothing left.” When she looks down, he’s wrapping up a small cloth bundle in his lap, tying careful knots over the handfuls of ash that she glimpses inside. There’s a flash of blue, right before Scanlan ties the last corners over – he’s saved the feathers, tucked them into the dust and bone for safekeeping. The sight nearly guts her, more than hearing the news, more than the feeling of his armor lying limp and unworn in her arms.

In the next second something sharp and bright uncurls in her – hope, maybe – and she wheels toward Keyleth and Pike. “Then we’ll bring him back.”

Pike looks at her first, with a trembling, weary pain in her face that makes Vex want to scream. “Vex… his body. I’ve always – we’ve always brought someone back using–,”

“I can do it,” Keyleth interrupts. Her voice is hollow but when she looks up her eyes are embers, glowing frail but fierce. “We have – ashes. His. That’s enough for me.”

“Keyleth,” Pike says, softly, but Keyleth shakes her head and gently untangles herself so she can stand. The mantle at her shoulders bristles, leaves and vines shifting in a breeze that winds up around her from the otherwise still grass.

“I can do it,” she says again, looking straight at Vex. There’s too much bound up in her gaze – guilt, maybe, but a measure of desperation too, and a thorny love that feels too intimate and too familiar to look at. Vex drops her eyes.

The armor sits in her hands, empty. Somewhere in it, there’s a note addressed to her, and it’s remembering this that makes her look back up, her mouth a hard line.

"Yes," she says. “Let’s do it, then.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!
> 
> find me on twitter: @clarifioris  
> or on tumblr: @sorrelsky


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